Team Fortress 2

The word "hero" gets thrown around a lot these days. Mostly by cowards who've never killed a man for no reason. But if you're a distinguished war veteran like me, you know that only three types of people deserve to be called "hero": men who dive on top of live grenades, men with the cahones to throw a live grenade, and the hard working men and women on the assembly line building live grenades.

That is it. End of story. No exceptions.

Having said that, if you're a distinguished war veteran like me, you also know how the chain of command works. So when some pencilneck down at TF2 HQ tells you to write a blog post adding someone to the Hero List, you do it! So listen up, because the hundreds of 3D modelers, texture artists, concept artists and other creative types who submit to the Workshop each and every day are the greatest generation of heroes, and Kritzkast is honoring them. These are just some of the many people who've made Team Fortress 2 what it is today, and by God, they deserve your respect until we are told otherwise.

Photo by Dan Tab r, from "Faces of Virtual Reality." Click for gallery.

Three days after Oculus announced that it was being purchased by Facebook for $2 billion, the VR company has hired programmer Michael Abrash, who has worked at Valve since 2011. Abrash has been working on Valve's virtual reality technology for the last couple years, and regularly posts deep technical discussions of VR on his blog. Abrash is joining Oculus as Chief Scientist, and in his introductory post on Oculus' website, he cites the Facebook acquisition--and Facebook's deep pockets--as "the final piece of the puzzle" necessary for VR to achieve greatness.

"A lot of what it will take to make VR great is well understood at this point, so it's engineering, not research; hard engineering, to be sure, but clearly within reach," Abrash writes in his introductory post. "However, it's expensive engineering. ... That's why I've written before that VR wouldn't become truly great until some company stepped up and invested the considerable capital to build the right hardware and that it wouldn't be clear that it made sense to spend that capital until VR was truly great. I was afraid that that Catch-22 would cause VR to fail to achieve liftoff.

"That worry is now gone. Facebook's acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can."

Abrash previously worked with John Carmack at id on Quake. He's also worked on Windows for Microsoft and on software graphics rendering.

Just last year, Abrash gave a talk at the Game Developer's Conference about the challenges of VR and showed off Valve's experiments with adding VR support to Team Fortress 2. At the time, Abrash claimed it would take years, or decades, to help VR overcome the limitations of technology. But when Valve showed off its VR technology at Steam Dev Days in January, attendees claimed it was even better than Oculus' Crystal Cove prototype. With Abrash and Carmack now both working at Oculus, Valve's hardware likely won't maintain that edge for long.

Check out our predictions for the future of Oculus Rift in the wake of its acquisition by Facebook.

Donations are now open for Tip of the Hats, an annual charity livestream event benefiting One Step Camp and hosted by the competitive Team Fortress 2 gaming community. The event will start streaming live at twitch.tv March 29th at 12:00 PM EST. Last year's inaugural event lasted 36 hours and raised over $35,000 towards camp experiences and other educational and excursion programs for children with cancer. Players from around the world participated in the livestream and helped to make it one of the biggest events in Team Fortress 2 history, with more than 65,000 people tuning in.

Entries are now open for The Infoshow Team Fortress 2 Tournament LAN Party, taking place this April 4th to 6th in Kaunas, Lithuania! Organized entirely by students, the event has grown into one of the biggest e-sport events in Lithuania for both casual and pro players. This year marks Team Fortress 2's debut at the biggest LAN Party in the Baltic countries! Tune into TeamFortress.TV on April 5th, Saturday 10:00 CET to watch.

Rust is already a purring, slurring engine of human depravity, but there’s no denying that it’s all rather barebones at the moment. You can explore, you can build a house around other people’s houses and take them prisoner but mercifully feed them tuna every couple hours, but Garry (of Garry’s Mod fame) and co have much bigger plans for the future. At this particular moment, that means a whole slew of improvements including a new UI, farming, and an item editor modeled after the one that produces Team Fortress 2′s infamous headwear selection.

Thanks to the Titanfall beta, my week has been mostly defined by super-stompy death machines. Even though that's over, my appreciation for the colossal metal monsters isn't about to end. For anyone else pining for the powerful crush of hydraulic hands, here's a brief hit in the form of a TF2 Source Filmmaker short. Unlike the game's actual giant robots, this version is a dramatically difficult challenge to bring down.

This is the second video in creator "Fedora Chronicles", although according to the creator, it doesn't have much in common with the first. Instead, it's a fully standalone story, and one of the best made SFM shorts I've seen for a while.